Re: [A-List] National Factor . . . certain aspects/ dateline Detroit/

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>> It's wacky, irresponsible, arguably racist, almost surely illegal. Mostly,
though, the Detroit City Council's $30 million-a-year plan for Africa Town is
a painful wail of the city's abject failure to help black Detroiters move
forward.

On Monday, the council authorized the city to earmark $30 million a year for
a race-based entrepreneurial zone that would be called Africa Town.

They based this action on the report of creative thinker Carl Anderson and
his PowerNomics Corp. - a $112,000 report that argues the city's black majority
is acting like a minority, despite political power, spending power, and the
power of sheer numbers.<<

Comment

One can call this the "Black Manifesto 2204" or the creative application of
"self determination" of nations and peoples . . . or bourgeois nationalism
plain and simple.

Where the Casino baron Barton failed in securing his own Casino in Detroit,
despite the financial and public support of mega star Michael Jackson (Billy
Jean, "I'm Bad" . . . yes that Michael Jackson) and legendary Motown singer
Stevie Wonder, Dr. Anderson has returned home to fix the problem.

Detroit is where the political split between the black workers and black
bourgeoisie reached its highest expression. Nothing illustrates Marxism and the
National Question better than real life and the daily unfolding social conflicts
revealing the class complexity if the American proletariat.

Formerly of the Carter administration, Dr. Claud Anderson was an early owner
of "Black Radio" in Detroit and the author of "Black Labor-White Wealth" . . .
the initial blueprint for economic stability of a section of the black
bourgeoisie or rather "self help for African Americans."

Yes, . . . I own an autographed copy of his book and it is worth owning to
understand how the African American intelligencia and left is league ahead of
the so-called Marxist in their description and understanding - not simply
definition of the national factor.

Dr. Anderson is an extremely accomplished and capable businessman and
academician and his 1994 "Black Labor - White Wealth" solidly placed him at the head
of a historically militant sector of the Black bourgeoisie whose roots goes
back to the defeat and over throw of Reconstruction and the clamp down of Jim
crow that created the segregated black market and "the peculiar phenomenon of
the black leader."

Dr. Anderson is not a punk or anyone's "boy" and has solid credentials that
places him as a skilled representative of that section of capital
associated/identified in history as the Negro National bourgeoisie. Its most notable
political representatives are intellectual giants such as Dr. Dubois, James Monroe
Trotter, Malcolm X, Cornel West and on the communists left Dr. James Jackson,
formerly of the CPUSA.

Yet . . . the destruction of Jim Crow destroyed the "black market" as such
and opened the door for the integration of both wings of the bourgeoisie into
the framework of international capital. The age old "Negro axiom" . . . "what
ever can happen will" has played itself out as the dialectic of the National
Question in the American Union.

What can't happen won't and what cannot happen is the improvement of the lot
of the industrial proletariat in Detroit on the basis of expanding the
economic and political base of the African American bourgeoisie.

The industrial proletariat in Detroit long ago gave practical resolution to
the ideological question of "progressive versus reactionary" bourgeois
nationalism. After all Detroit was the birth place of the Nation of Islam, the
Republic of New Africa and (drum role please) the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers.

Dr. or rather brother Claud Anderson has returned home to try and do the
impossible. Like the old soul singer Tyronne Davis, he seeks to "Turn Back the
Hands of Time."  Proletariat and bourgeoisie has in fact and were in fact united
on the basis of the bond was capital as active reproduction of material
values. What we once called the "nigga wrench" has shed its national peculiarity and
become the proletarian wrench . . . hurled into the machine from outside the
active process of production while operating within the process and reveals
itself in the demographic of Detroit.

Black capitalism or rather turning over the administrative function of
bourgeois property to African Americans will not solve the social divide in Detroit
or Chechnya. Pensions are involved as well as electricity bills, water bills,
rent, house notes, car payments, medical payments and employment.

Self determination as a political slogan was rejected decades ago in the
quarters that house the industrial slaves of capital that is Detroit. Let us not
forget, Detroit is not a city description but a geographic and class
designation embracing at least one-third of the state of Michigan.

Two political events happen simultaneously: the call for a general strike and
the assertion of the Black bourgeois to establish its hegemony over the
political movement. That a section of this historically evolved capital supports
the call for a General Strike is misunderstood by the ideologues. Ever section
of the bourgeoisie facing death in the market is extremely militant and
"revolutionary."

Dr. Claud Anderson inverts the demand for Black Reparations, a demand that is
essentially for government funding of the African American bourgeoisie, and
calls it "PowerNomics."

I think I moved to Texas to quick . . . but hey . . . my wife looks Mexican
and why miss the next upsurge and sharpest expression of the political struggle
of the past twenty years.

By right this should have been written for Marxmail . . . but . . . hey your
know the story already.

Melvin P.